A relationship in 8 Cs

I’ve refined years of study and experience to generate successful principles which can be expressed in 8 words beginning with C:

Curiosity

Compassion

Consciousness

Commitment

Communication

Collaboration

Creativity

Clarity

1. Curiosity is a genuine desire to hear from your partner/s, based on the knowledge that their experience is different from yours. If it’s a new relationship, there’s lots to learn about each other. Even for those who’ve been in relationship for a long time, there can still be something new to discover.

2. Compassion involves sincere support and empathy for your partner/s. Compassion might involve sympathising for their struggles and challenges, with respect for their survival strategies and adaptations during their journey through life. Compassion is incompatible with judgement or moralising. Instead, compassion offers understanding.

3. Consciousness is carrying dual awareness not only of one’s own inner process but also of the impact on the other person. This involves emotional intelligence and radical honesty about one’s own motives and relationship needs. It can evoke exquisite vulnerability for each person to be honest about any of their needs, hurts, wounds, traumas and demons. Yet this is the growth path.

4. Commitment means upholding the relationship according to the spoken contract about what each person means to the other or others. This comes under strain with competing demands of our time and attention such as work or illness or obligations within a wider social network of family and friends.

5. Communication deepens connection and understanding if done without blame, shame, criticism, or judgement. If each person speaks about their own experience and meaning-making, with “I” statements rather than degrading the other person/s with “you” narratives, this creates a fundamental yet relational shift in any conversation. Active listening wtih empathic understanding helps.

6. Collaboration is then enabled as an intention to work with the partner/s in addressing together any patterns that diminish the relationship. It’s seductively easier to attack the other person/s than to confront the patterns which are often co-created.

7. Creativity means mutual development of solutions to which each person has contributed in joined-up solutions. The opposite would be edicts or diktats from one person to another about behavioiur or expectations in the relationship. Facing situations together, where each person in the relationship stands shoulder-to-shoulder rather than opposite each other. Mutual creative methods are likely to last longer and be more effective than demands or dictatorship.

8. Clarity can then be generated from a solid relational foundation about what the relationship means and how to go about the hugely multi-dimensional task of living it. What the relationship is and is not can be slow and arduous to negotiate.

We understand that relationships aren’t easy all the time

It sounds simple but can be so much trickier to do if you strive to live by these principles.

We get caught up in our own stuff which can be unconscious patterns which we developed as adaptations from past hurts picked up and carried along the way. It’s hugely hard to see our partner/s without the filter of our own assumptions and priorities.

I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying it’s possible. This is according to many models of relationship such as Imago, Gottman, Terry Real’s RLT (I’ve trained in all of these approaches, and others).

My aim in offering relationship therapy is to support each client relationship in uncovering what is situated beneath the surface, so that the buried unconscious material no longer acts as a tripwire or minefield affecting the relational space. This seems to hold true whatever the composition of the relationship and the social identities of the people within it.

For those who want to do the work, but importantly want to do the work together, I’m here with relational support.

We’re here to help

There’s no need to suffer in silence. Resourcing yourself is a sure-fire way to navigate your relationship/s without going crazy.
One way to do that is through relationship therapy. Sarah Briggs is accredited by COSRT in the UK as a sex & relationship therapist; she is also certified by Imago internaitonally as a Certified Advanced Clinician to work with couples and relationships.

Or check out our ebooks which effortlessly guide you through ways to handle emotions and communication.